Part 1: 'We could see the Germans and their tanks'

Burdick in 1944

Courtesy of Donald W. Burdick

Donald W. Burdick, of Forks Township, sits for a studio portrait in Carbondale, PA, during a 15-day furlough in May, 1944. Burdick was a pre-med student at the University of Scranton when the Army drafted him during World War II. In July 1944, the private first class landed in northern France...

Donald W. Burdick, of Forks Township, sits for a studio portrait in Carbondale, PA, during a 15-day furlough in May, 1944. Burdick was a pre-med student at the University of Scranton when the Army drafted him during World War II. In July 1944, the private first class landed in northern France... (Courtesy of Donald W. Burdick)

Donald W. Burdick was a pre-med student at the University of Scranton when the Army drafted him during World War II. In July 1944, he landed in northern France with a field artillery observation battalion.

Five months later, Pfc. Burdick's unit was in Luxembourg when the Germans attacked and the Battle of the Bulge began. Today, the 84-year-old Forks Township resident remembers holding out during the siege of Bastogne.

We were in the woods just outside of the little town of Clervaux on the Our River. Germany was across the river.

We had been through quite a bit of combat. In France, we'd been at St. Lo, we'd gotten through the hedgerows and gone through Paris. Our equipment was getting pretty well worn. By the time we got up to the Our River in Luxembourg, it was for rest and repairs.

On the morning of Dec. 16, all of a sudden we heard a rattling of cans. The cooks and bakers from the 28th Infantry Division were coming toward us with all the equipment they had -- mess kits. They had been overrun by a Panzer division.

They said the Germans were coming.

I don't think they were with us more than 20 minutes when the order came down: Pack up everything on your trucks as quick as you can and get out of there -- retreat.

That's exactly what we did. We just kept going and going and going. On the 19th, we got into Bastogne in Belgium.

We couldn't go any farther because German units were coming the other way. They had us cut off. We were soon surrounded, and the possibility of getting out was almost nil.

Normally, we were on the move, but at Bastogne the tables were turned. Now we were on the defensive.

For days, no supplies came in; we couldn't go out to get them. We had cloud cover, so we couldn't get reinforced from the air. Our food rations, our ammunition, our gasoline, our artillery shells got down to where we had very little.

It was one of the coldest winters they had in years over there -- bone-chilling cold. And it snowed heavily.

I was scared to death.

There was the question of how you would end up. Were you going to be shot? Were you going to be blown apart? Would you be maimed? Would you be taken prisoner and abused?

Would you ever get home?

A plan for defense

When we got to Bastogne, my unit -- the 16th Field Artillery Observation Battalion -- stayed in a huge building, kind of like a military barracks. It was dilapidated, and the Germans kept shelling it, tearing it down.

We were in there trying to get sheltered. Somebody got the idea: What kind of flooring is here? We found there was a gap between the ground and the floor, so we got under there. We called it our rat hole. That was our protection from falling debris.

After we were there for a day or two, the 101st Airborne Division took charge of us, organizing us into groups. They told us what we had to do and where we had to go. We became infantrymen instead of artillerymen.

Bastogne had been a hub, a very busy area, with a lot of roads coming in and out. The 101st had a 19-mile perimeter around the town. They said four of the main roads had to be blockaded, so they set us up at one of them outside of town.

Our roadblock was the second of three lines of defense. The 101st guys with their tanks were in front of us -- they were clever boys, the real fighters. Behind us was a field with artillery that fired over us.

It was a pretty good unit on our roadblock, 75 to 100 guys. Some were 101st guys, and there were some Army engineers and stragglers from other units mixed in there, too. We all had M-1 rifles, and some had carbines. But we had cooks and bakers who hadn't fired a gun in years.

We spent four or five days at the roadblock in the cold and snow. We were off to the side of the road and had trees, stone walls and foxholes for protection.

The Germans shelled us to soften us up and made several runs at us. They would first run into the 101st guys farther out. And the gunners behind us would fire their howitzers to the point where they were told to slacken off because we didn't have that much ammo.

We could see the Germans and their tanks. We'd crouch down, hold fast and hope they'd get stopped before they got to us.

That was crunch time -- fear and anxiety time. But they never quite got up to us at the roadblock.

If they knew how bad off we were, they probably could have kept on coming, but they would give up and pull back. We were blessed that they didn't make that final run.

When people think of artillery observation, they think we were flying around in airplanes, and that's not true. Gun crew observers did fly in Piper Cubs, but we were the guys who were eating the dirt.

We were the ''sound and flash boys'' on the ground. We'd go out and find where the enemy artillery or mortar squad was, or where the tanks were located that were firing upon our units. That's what we did until we got to Bastogne, and that's what we did after Bastogne, when we got on the run again.

Usually four of us would crawl out into no man's land with microphones and go in different directions to plant them. That was so we could capture the sound of the German weapons from different angles.

A wire crew would come out with us and wire the microphones back to a sound recording machine at our command post. We had phones strapped over us, and they could be wired up, too. If you lost the microphone, you could use the phone.

The microphones would pick up the sound and send it down the wire to the recording machine. The machine had a roll of 35 mm film, and it would print a graph on the film showing the peaks and valleys of the sound vibrations from all four microphones. The film would look like a seismograph.

We had draftsmen who would interpret the data and calculate it in real time, or what we called ''sound seconds.'' And they would use triangulation to plot the coordinates -- the source of the sound -- on a map grid of the area.

Then we'd call the coordinates back to a gun crew, and the gunners would use that information to fire on the enemy artillery or tank or mortar squad.

We were about 75 percent accurate, even though it was crude by today's standards. And the work was risky. Our wire crews got beat up pretty bad, but most of us were lucky. We never got hit.

In his first budget address to lawmakers, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf laid out an ambitious $33.8 billion spending plan that raises taxes a combined 16 percent while slashing corporate and property taxes, restores cuts to education and wipes out the state's deficit.